To Make Inside Concrete and Outside Vast (Motif 1)

Laura Bullock

Laura Bullock’s work unfolds like an architecture of memory. Using materials drawn from both the structural and the domestic - plaster, marble powder, aluminium dust, insulation paper, brass connectors - she builds quiet, monochrome surfaces that hover between solidity and erasure. Patterns repeat, doors reappear, fragments of façades are pressed into relief. What looks at first like minimal abstraction soon reveals itself as the residue of lived space, an emotional blueprint imprinted into matter.

Her practice is deeply attuned to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and in particular his reflections on thresholds — a doorway, a curtain, or a wall: protective or excluding, sheltering or divisive, poised between intimacy and estrangement, security and exposure.

Forms, lines, or materials are seemingly repeated which at first glance might suggest sameness, but in fact, each repetition carries a slight variation - a shift in pressure, texture, or weight. These variations mirror memory itself: recalled again and again, never identical, always altered in the act of remembering. Her process of repeating thus echoes the fragility of how memory works. Because her work is quiet, minimal, and monotone, it carries a restraint that sharpens rather than diminishes the emotional undertone. Each piece seems to hover between being there (a solid, material object) and slipping away (a fragile, dissolving impression), embodying the charged tension of poignant dissolution.